Attention Quote by William James

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is…

— Christopher Hampton

We come away from the tragedies of [William] Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form - yet…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of…

— John Cheever

Legitimately produced, and truly inspired, fiction interprets humanity, informs the understanding, and quickens the affections. It reflects ourselves, warns us against prevailing social follies,…

— Henry Theodore Tuckerman

“Fiction is usually seen as escapist entertainment...But it's hard to reconcile the escapist theory of fiction with the deep patterns we find in the…

— Jonathan Gottschall

Some acts of worldbuilding in fiction instantiate a milieu that is so culturally odd and exotic, so displaced from the audience's consensus reality in…

— Paul Di Filippo

The world is changing from day to day; it is high time for our writers to take off their masks, look frankly, keenly, and…

— Lu Xun

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

— Siri Hustvedt

My own sense is that fiction is inching its way over to join poetry on the cultural margin. It's an area of passionate concern…

— Matthew Specktor

Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and…

— Annie Dillard

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and…

— John Cheever

The real world is cruel, but in the comfort of literature it can bring some light.

— Jeremy Limn